Latest posts
Ethiopia is Cheap!
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As I suspected, Addis Ababa is a lot cheaper when you leave Bole. But prices are still high - which is curious. Why would prices be lower in Indonesia, which has a much higher GDP than Ethiopia? Elle and I realise it's probably to do with the fact t...
Ethiopia is expensive!
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So, this is my second day in Ethiopia. Some initial reactions: Addis Ababa is nowhere near as cheap as I was expecting it to be. We were hoping for prices closer to those we paid in Indonesia, where we lived for about 5 months in 2007. Instead, price...
Arrival in Ethiopia
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So, I've arrived in Ethiopia. I'll write a proper update soon. Permalink | Leave a comment »...
Looking forward to Diaspora and the decentralised net!
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This is my first post to this blog using Mozilla Thunderbird. It's an open-source e-mail client from the same people behind Firefox. Hopefully, it's going to let me write my blog posts offline and upload them easily to Posterous when I have an intern...
@JulienFrisch Thank you for one of the best euroblog posts I've ever read! ;-D
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Permalink | Leave a comment »...
I'm Having the Strangest Internet Problems ((Tags: Posterous, iPad, Tele2)
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I'm having bizaare internet problems at the moment. The entire range of Google products works at full broadband speed (Google search, images, news, maps, etc.)... but nothing else. Any other non-Google page fails to load. The strange thing is tha...
A Life of Repetitious, Soul Destroying Drudgery
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@OreganMichael on Twitter has automated his Twitter feed so that every day it tweets: Michael is enduring a life of repetitious, soul destroying drudgery.It tweets this every day. Nothing else, just this. For the rest of his life. There's somethi...
Just found an interesting patent for indentifying people by the way they type on keyboards
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This patent is from 2000, so I'm sure it's out of date by now. The interesting thing is that most keystroke logging I read about is to do with surveillance - but this one claims to have a commercial application. It's an attempt to do away...
Social Networks Are All Middle-Men /cc @a4agarwal
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Sachin Agarwal, the CEO of Posterous (aka @a4agarwal on Twitter), was kind enough to comment on my last post. I was maybe too hard on Posterous in that post (only my second ever using the service) when I said that anything I could do on Posterous I c...
Posterous & Tumblr Do Nothing Wordpress Can't Do
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Don't get me wrong - Posterous and Tumblr both have their advantages, and this blog is going to be useful during my time in Africa. However, it's not a long-term solution. It's a cost-effective way to get a blog up and running and integrated with oth...
Blogging by E-mail in Ethiopia
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I’ve been thinking about the challenges of blogging in Ethiopia – and the best solution I can come up with is to set up a Posterous blog to let me post by e-mail. I had originally chosen a very light Wordpress theme for this blog, but I t...
Blogging without Internet in Africa
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In less than a week, I'll be on a plane to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. According to most estimates, Ethiopia has some of the worst internet access on the planet. Not only is internet slow (mostly dial-up) but there are also regular power cuts which disrup...
Democracy in the EU – Part Two: Two Pillars
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Welcome to the second part in my series examing democracy in the EU. Last time, I attempted to define the “democratic deficit” – and looked a bit at the history of the phrase. In this post I will continue by exploring the two pillar...
Democracy in the EU – Part One: The Problem
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So just what is this term “democratic deficit” that everyone uses when they talk about the EU? I’m going to publish a series of posts examining democracy in the EU – starting with a look at the term itself. The content will mostly com...
EUFOR – Très Fort!
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In 2006, there was a European Union Force (EUFOR) deployment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in support of the United Nations election-monitoring mission. To reassure the Congolese that EUFOR came in peace, the EU commissioned a 5 minute vide...
A Remarkable Weekend
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What an exhausting, confusing, chaotic, exciting, unexpected, depressing, remarkable weekend. For the last several weeks, EU leaders have been struggling to get ahead of the story. Instead of leading, they have been reacting to events in the financia...
My Europe
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My Europe is a compromise. Politics at the EU level is consensus politics, done through bargaining, horse-trading, lowest-common-demoninator agreements and backroom deals. That is why there can never be a “United States of Europe” and why...
My Europe
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My Europe is a compromise. Politics at the EU level is consensus politics, done through bargaining, horse-trading, lowest-common-demoninator agreements and backroom deals. That is why there can never be a “United States of Europe” and why...
